by James Axler
“Um,” Ryan said. “Oh.”
Mildred had to laugh out loud. Maybe it was the palm wine speaking through her. It didn’t have a high alcohol content, she was pretty sure, but she wasn’t used to drinking much, either. But it delighted her to see Ryan at a loss for words, for once.
“We see, of course, that two of your males are paired,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “We respect that, of course. We know the rules of hospitality. We are not jivaros.”
“Jivaros?” J.B. asked.
“Legendary cannies,” Ricky said. “Some say they’re a real tribe on the mainland, down south. It just means ‘hicks’ here, really.”
“But three have no mates,” the woman went on. “The old one and the young ones. We ask therefore that they do us the honor of sleeping with some of our unmarried women.”
A pair of giggling young women appeared beside Doc. He looked around in bewilderment as they tugged him unceremoniously to his feet by the sleeves of his frock coat. Obviously premarital sex wasn’t a problem in this ville.
Doc straightened and brushed off his sleeves. “When in Rome, they say. Lead on, ladies! I am entirely at your disposal.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Chupacabras,” Mildred said. “I thought there weren’t many of those in our world.”
The elder couple’s hut was capacious, containing a central pole, woven sleeping mats scattered around and not much else. Light from the bonfire outside, which had been allowed to burn low and was being tended by a couple of kids, flickered through the open door, giving a shifting, uncertain illumination to the interior. The door was a rolled-up mat that could be unfastened and allowed to hang when necessary.
Aside from the slight scent of stale sweat, human grease and smoke, apparently from when it was too rainy to build fires outside, it didn’t stink hardly at all. Krysty had slept worse places in her life. Lots of them, in fact.
“Mebbe they’re different chupacabras,” Krysty said. “Not like the creatures in San Juan.”
“Turns out we were wrong,” Ryan said. “What difference does that make? They’re fucking muties. They’ll try to kill us if we run into them—like everything else that lives in the direction we’re going, apparently.”
“Why not try another direction?” J.B. asked.
“Two reasons,” Ryan said. “First off, I’m guessing this Handsome guy is concentrating his island-conquering efforts on the coast, for the time being, anyway. Just stands to reason. Most of what’s worthwhile, ports and trade goods and that, they’re all on the ocean. If he gets hold of enough of those, he’ll control this whole region, or the parts worth having, instead of spreading his troops out trying to subdue every little rad-blasted valley.”
Ryan looked across the circle to Ricky. For some reason, the kid hadn’t availed himself of the opportunity to go with one of the young women, despite their urging. From the way he looked at them, licking his lips and swallowing, he liked them fine; that wasn’t the problem. Krysty wondered if he was just shy.
“That square with what you know, kid?” Ryan asked.
Ricky nodded. He sat cross-legged with his hands on his thighs, rocking back and forth slowly and staring at something nobody else could see. Krysty reckoned she was just as glad she couldn’t.
It wasn’t likely anything she hadn’t seen before.
“That was the idea we got from what the travelers and refugees said,” he said.
Ryan nodded.
“What’s your other reason, Ryan?” J.B. asked. He and Mildred sat side by side, just touching. They were a lot more restrained in their displays of affection than Krysty and Ryan were. But they couldn’t hide from Krysty that they didn’t plan on going right to sleep after the palaver was over.
“Well,” Ryan said, “it’s like this. The monsters have to love the mountains for some reason. They aren’t likely hanging up there because they like the scenery. So what are the odds they’ve got some kind of connection to the...place we’re looking for?”
Krysty glanced at Ricky. He didn’t respond. It wasn’t as if they could keep secret that they were looking for something. But they couldn’t ask for hints on how to find the mat-trans without revealing something about it. So Ryan had decided to tell people they were looking for some kind of special cave or hidden place, and let them draw their own conclusions about what they wanted with it.
The odds were good they’d never imagine anything close to the truth.
J.B. nodded. “Does make sense.” He looked up, grinning ruefully. “Damn it, anyway. If that’s right, the closer we get to our goal, the more monsters we’ve got to wade through.”
“Well,” Ryan said, “I might be wrong.”
But he didn’t sound optimistic, nor did Krysty feel that way herself.
“So,” Ryan said, turning to their new friend and tipping his head to one side so the curly, shaggy hair hung down over his weather-beaten face, “Ricky. Why are you hanging with us, exactly? I thought you were fixated on finding and rescuing your sister.”
“Yes,” Ricky said slowly. He didn’t look up or even seem to focus his eyes on the here and now. “I want to find her. I will find her. And then I will make the coños pay!”
That didn’t seem likely to Krysty—not the finding his sister part, because she had no idea. But the part about making El Guapo, his shark-toothed sec boss or really any number of his henchmen pay for abducting her. Not that he hadn’t exacted a down payment when he’d shot several of them, rescuing Ryan from their flanking maneuver several days before. But still, it was a pretty tall order.
Of course Ryan didn’t buy that any more than she did.
“Okay,” he said, drawing the word out long. “So, then, we’re headed into the mountains. Away from the coast, where you say this El Guapo is hanging and banging. And if we find what we’re looking for, we’re not going back that way anytime soon.”
Ryan shook his head. “At first I thought mebbe we might sign on with him. You know, a man like that, building an army like that, he’s got to rely heavy-like on mercies. He’ll always be hiring.”
“You wouldn’t!” Ricky burst out. He snapped upright and stared at Ryan with frightened-cat eyes. “You couldn’t! They’re coldhearts! Monsters!”
“Son,” J.B. said gently, “you don’t know us. You don’t know what we’ve done to survive. You don’t know what we’ll do to keep on doing that thing. Fact is, we were also thinking seriously about taking up with a gang of pirates not so long ago. Doubt they was much better than this Handsome fella of yours.”
Ricky looked at him, first as if he thought the armorer was joking, then with a look of outrage so intense Krysty almost laughed. Truly, the boy had to have led a sheltered life, in a prosperous family, in a happy ville. Whose very prosperity and happiness obviously doomed them, in the end, despite their willingness to fight to keep both.
“Why didn’t you join them, then?”
J.B. shrugged. “Same reason we aren’t likely to sign on with El Guapo anytime soon,” he said. “Before we could reach the negotiation stage with the pirates, we kind of got crosswise of them. Wound up putting holes in a few of them, truth to tell. Mebbe more than a few.”
“Plus the ones your boobies blew sky-high, J.B.,” Ryan said with satisfaction.
“There’s that, surely.”
“Wait,” Ricky said, staring at J.B. with his outrage turning to awe. “That big explosion in the harbor a few hours before I met you. I didn’t see it, but you could’ve heard the blast on the other side of the island, and I saw the black smoke rill up into the sky. Was that you?”
J.B. nodded. “It was.”
“Magnífico,” the boy breathed.
J.B. dipped his head self-deprecatingly. “Things sort of came together, you know? Anyways, looks like now we gone and crapped the bed where this El Guapo’s concerned, too.”
He reached up to scratch his head under his fedora. “The fact is, we got a way of rubbing people the wrong way. Shame, sometimes.�
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Ricky shook his head in wonder. “I knew I was right to join you.”
“Actually,” Mildred said drily, “you tried to rob us.”
“I was hungry! After that, I mean. And that’s the reason I stay with you. I want to stay alive, you see. I need to, if I’m ever going to find Yami!”
Ryan scratched his upper lip with his thumb. “Well, we do have a knack for surviving,” he admitted. “But we also have a knack for getting into places where that is far from given. And fireblast, kid! We got a way of being hard on people who travel with us, I got to tell you.”
Ricky shook that off as if trying to dislodge a biting fly from his ear. He’s young, Krysty thought. He doesn’t believe him. He probably didn’t yet believe he’d ever really die. Kids that age just didn’t. Even though he’d seen just how fragile life was, up close and in the most horrifying way possible.
“All right,” Ryan said, hunkering down so he was at eye level with the boy. “What’s the real reason?”
To his credit, and a bit to Krysty’s surprise, Ricky didn’t try to dodge. He swallowed hard, and in the bad light looked as if his olive skin got a shade or two paler. But, after that hesitation, he answered straight.
“It’s like this,” he said. “El Guapo will never let you and your friends roam free about Puerto Rico. He must neutralize you.”
“How do you reckon that?” J.B. asked. “Dark night, he’s got an army! There’s just six of us. Okay, seven, counting you and that fancy whisper-shooting blaster of yours. Even if his army’s just a few hundred strong, like it’s liable to be, we aren’t a trickling piss in the mighty ocean by comparison. Ow, why did you elbow me in the ribs like that, Mildred?”
Ignoring the glare she gave J.B., the boy smiled broadly.
“El Guapo means to be the big man on the island, you know? The top man. The only man. But you, Señor Ryan, you are muy macho. Your friends are muy especial. El Guapo will never be the only real man on the island as long as you’re on it. Nor will he be the biggest.
“You’ve made your presence known to him. So El Guapo must deal with you and your friends—recruit you, or kill you. And after our meeting with the EUN, he will now want to see you die slowly. He does not like frustration, this man.”
“No,” Ryan said slowly. “I reckon he doesn’t, at that.”
Ricky beamed. “So you see, the Handsome One will hunt you. He is hunting you. He can’t bear the thought of a man such as you roaming the island, giving the lie to his claims of being the biggest, the baddest, the most powerful. So where you are, there El Guapo will be, sooner instead of later. And then I will find my sister and set her free!”
Ryan sat down, arching a brow. “Mebbe,” he said dubiously. “It’s still hard to believe he’d take time off from his important business of conquering the nuke-sucking island to take a chance against a raggedy-assed bunch like us.”
“You will see I’m right,” the boy said. “Just wait.”
* * *
AS RYAN HAD FEARED—and expected—the clues they got led them deeper inland into the mountains.
“My cousin, señor,” the man in the battered hat said. “She knew a man—a lover, to tell the truth, which is a scandal to her poor mother—who said he saw a curious cave opening into some rocks. It wasn’t so easy to spot. An outcropping hid it. He happened to be out hunting, and came at it from across a hill on the other side of the valley at just the right time for the light to strike it.”
“So what did he do?” Mildred asked.
The trader shrugged. “He said a monster attacked him then. So he ran away. Nor would he ever go back, or even tell anyone about where he found the cave.”
“What kind of monster?” Ricky asked, sounding more excited than he should have.
Ryan was scouting around, not looking at the little dusty trader or his loaded donkey. The trail they were following ran along a jagged-back ridgetop, with sparse vegetation. It gave him a pretty good look in all directions. The problem was, it also gave everybody in all directions a good look at them. Some heavy forests grew nearby, so people in them had the edge in seeing without being seen.
“That, he would not say. He did say he saw many more monsters there than he had ever seen before in his life. He said more than one chased him before he got away. Truly, his experience terrified him. He was so scared his hair turned white.”
“That doesn’t actually happen,” Mildred began.
“Shut it,” Ryan said sharply. “We’re here for information. Not debate.”
Mildred scowled mutinously, but she shut it.
“Muchas gracias, señor,” Ryan told the man. “Good journey.”
“Buena viaje, señores y señoritas.” The man hauled on the braided leather rein fastened to his donkey’s halter. Reluctantly, the little beast pulled its snout out of a clump of grass and followed him down the trail, chewing placidly.
“I think that was a load of B.S.,” Mildred said. “Getting scared doesn’t actually turn a person’s hair white.”
“Do I care?” Ryan said. “What does anybody think who isn’t fixated on this damn hair-color thing?”
“I think,” J.B. said, taking off his glasses and polishing them with a handkerchief, “that guy had a tail. Hard to see. Tip just sticks out the bottom of that long shirt thing he’s got on.”
Ryan didn’t even look after the trader with the big hat and the tiny beast of burden. “Anybody think anything that might, you know, actually load us some magazines?”
“How can we trust him?” Mildred said. “I mean, if he exaggerates about—”
“Mildred.”
“Sorry, Ryan. Shutting up now.”
“Notwithstanding the veracity, or lack thereof, in certain details of the man’s account,” Doc said, “in broadest outline, what he told us is much of a piece with the rest of what we have been hearing.”
“What that mean?” Jak demanded.
“It means,” J.B. said, “that just because he might have miscounted the number of rivets on an undercarriage, doesn’t mean a wag didn’t run over him.”
Jak grunted. “Big help.”
“So, what do you think, lover?” Krysty asked.
“The one place we need is the place that’s swarming thickest with monsters, on a place called Monster Island,” Ryan said. “I think that sucks.”
* * *
THEIR QUESTIONS CONTINUED to evoke mostly blank stares and fearful evasions, but also tantalizing hints from the people they met. One hint led them west into a lower region, an area of hills and broad valleys. It rained frequently there, through some freak of the Carib weather, disordered by the Big Nuke and skydark and still not settled.
It was raining now, in fact, fat, hot drops that burst like tiny water grenades off the companions’ faces. They trudged along through a break in the trees. A true canopy rain forest had grown up here, with enough breakage in the upper foliage to allow dense undergrowth to sprout in places. They were following a trail, an animal track, really.
Behind Krysty, Doc was softly singing “Sweet Adeline” to himself. When she glanced back through the rain she saw him smiling dreamily. His watery-blue eyes were distant. He was off wandering again, following a path that had nothing to do with his long legs and big feet going up and down in the physical world. He’s back with his wife and children when he smiles like that, she thought.
She smiled, herself. She was glad Doc had that escape from the hard realities of the world from time to time. She did fear, though, that someday he’d stray off down some mental pathway and never find his way back.
Ryan brought up the rear, longblaster in hand. The weapon didn’t quite have the long-range punch his older Steyr had. But the sniper rifle was just that: a specialized tool that wasn’t much use at closer ranges. If anything jumped out at them from the dense walls of rain-wet vegetation, he was ready to blast the hell out of it.
J.B. had point for a change, with Ricky walking right behind him, then Mildred. J.B. toted his S
mith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun. The local boy had his peculiar longblaster. Neither Mildred nor Krysty had weapons in hand.
Jak was doing what he usually did in unknown country: ranging out front, along their flanks, hanging back to keep their back trail clear. He’d been especially edgy about that the past few days, although he wouldn’t explain why.
Not even Ryan pressed him. Jak had a feeling. If he knew anything, he’d say as much. And while he was far from stupe, expressing himself in words wasn’t his strong suit. When he just felt something, and people tried to pump him for specifics, he got sullen and defensive and clammed up.
She smiled. They were a family, as tight-knit as any she’d known. Yet they were also a unit, in the old military sense. Each had a role, each functioned smoothly in it, and they all knew one another well enough that they anticipated the others’ actions without much need for words.
Mildred compared them to how a jazz band played. When the time came to improvise, any one of them might take the lead, confident the others could follow. Krysty had never heard a jazz band herself, but she caught the drift.
Krysty frowned. Something had just tickled the edge of her peripheral vision. She felt the hairs prickle at the back of her neck.
She didn’t have Jak’s senses, honed taut as a wildcat’s by a life prowling in the bayou, hunting the deadliest of beast, human and mutie prey. But she had her own bond with the natural world—with Gaia—a sense of connection to earth and what lived on it.
“Ryan,” she said softly over her shoulder. She felt a strong desire not to speak aloud. She didn’t want to alert whatever was out there that she was aware of it. She would have passed the word through Doc, but the old man was still in his own little world. “Something’s out there.”
“Triple-red, people,” Ryan said, in the soft speech that was much more stealthy than a whisper’s hiss. “Stay sharp.”
A shape appeared beside J.B. One moment the armorer was shouldering past a branch that ended in a clump of leaves like a sharp green shellburst. The next heartbeat he had something right alongside.
